


A Side of You I Never Knew

by Carrieosity



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Humor, Insecure Victor Nikiforov, M/M, Post-Canon, Retired Husbands, Yuuri's college years, smart yuuri
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 13:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11875365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrieosity/pseuds/Carrieosity
Summary: Well, how was Victor supposed to know he was married to an absolute genius? Nobody had ever told him! Well, there's no way he can let it go on being a secret.(Or: Victor finds Yuuri's college diploma and realizes there were a few details he'd missed.)





	A Side of You I Never Knew

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I probably spent more time researching the details for this one-shot than I did actually writing it. Note: one college course in linguistics does not an expert make, so if I screwed up on any of those details, forgive me.

"Yuuri, what's all this?" Victor was rummaging through the hallway closet that had become the catch-all container for their St. Petersburg apartment. Before Yuuri had moved in, the closet had been merely full, mostly holding random boxes and bags of objects and items that had no obvious use or proper spot in which to be otherwise kept. Though Yuuri had travelled lightly when he'd moved to Russia, there were still a number of items he hadn't quite gotten around to unboxing yet, and now the closet's condition might be better described as "stuffed to bursting."

Victor has been in the process of making dinner, and he'd suddenly recalled an evening several months past when the dangerous combination of his periodic bouts of insomnia and the Phenazepam to which he resorted when the lack of sleep became too unbearable had once again left him open to the siren's song of online shopping. He rarely remembered the purchases he'd made in his drowsy stupors, and occasionally they trended toward the surreal (the time when he'd been baffled by the arrival of shipment of a dozen different CDs of Balinese gamelan music was one such occasion), but sometimes he felt grateful for sleepy Victor's acquisitions. Somewhere in the closet was some sort of kitchen implement that claimed to be able to turn yams into noodles, and the idea now sounded like a worthy experiment.

Unearthing the tool, though, was proving challenging, especially since many of the boxes and bags were frustratingly unlabeled. He'd just opened yet another such box, but instead of packing material and kitchen tools, he found folders, heavy manila envelopes, and typed pages in English, fastened together with paperclips. Curious, he lifted one of the top envelopes, a large and expensive-looking white linen one, and peeked inside.

_"The regents of Wayne State University, on the nomination of the faculty of the College of Letters of Arts and Sciences, hereby confer upon KATSUKI YUURI…"_

"Wow," Victor murmured to himself, grinning and full of pride. This didn't belong in an envelope in a box! This needed to be framed and hung on the wall! He let his eyes skim over the rest of the diploma. Of course, he'd known that Yuuri had graduated from college, but other than stories of the adventures and misadventures that he and Phichit had experienced during those years, Victor suddenly realized that he'd never asked about the details of his Yuuri's time in Detroit. He felt a surge of guilt about that, and it only grew as he read more, and his eyes got wider.

"Yuuri?" he called again. His husband was still in the kitchen, watching the livestream of Yuri Plisetsky's competition, going on in Canada, and he was apparently too focused to hear anything else. Yuri was officially being coached by Victor, since Yakov's slow transition into retirement, but there was an unspoken assumption that Yuuri was the one handling most of the details and administration involved in managing Yuri's career. Victor stood up, brushing the dust from his hands on his sweatpants, and went in search of some answers.

"Yuuri, what is _this?"_ he said, holding up the piece of thick paper stock that had somehow managed to completely upend, in a few phrases, so much of he'd thought he'd understood about the man he loved.

"What?" Yuuri said distractedly, pulling his eyes away from the laptop screen and blinking to refocus on Victor. When he saw what he was holding, Yuuri frowned and shrugged. "Just my diploma. You knew I went to college. I know I've told you that."

"Yuuri, this doesn't say you 'went to college'," Victor argued, cringing at the slight whine that crept into his voice. "This says you earned—" he stopped, turning the diploma to read out loud, "—a bachelor of arts with dual majors in linguistics and in anthropology, with a minor in Global Cultures and Identities, _summa cum laude_!" He shook the diploma accusingly.

"I'm…sorry?" Yuuri looked baffled now, and Victor sighed.

"No, don't—I'm not…I'm just…how did I not _know_ about any of this?"

"Well, it's not like it's something that comes up in casual conversation," Yuuri said, shaking his head and trying to subtly turn back toward the computer screen. Victor looked over his head and didn't recognize the skater competing. Honestly, they all looked so _young_ anymore. Since he and Yuuri had finally retired for good last year, it suddenly felt as though everyone on the ice was only a few steps out of childhood. He pushed away the thought, returning to the more pressing matters at hand.

"What on earth does that mean? This is incredible, Yuuri! Of _course,_ it should come up in conversation! Aren't you proud of it?"

Now Yuuri was beginning to get that wrinkle between his eyes that meant he was feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable. He took the diploma out of Victor's hand, running a finger over the university seal, before laying it on the table and gently pushing it away. "It's just a piece of paper, Victor. I paid a lot of money to get it, and it's not like I regret that, but it's just paper and a couple of letters I could put at the end of my name if I wanted."

"Then why don't you?" As confused as Yuuri was, Victor thought he was even more so. "We always talk about 'gold medalist this,' or 'Olympic champion that,' but I've never even heard you use the _word_ 'linguistics' since I've known you!"

The speaker erupted with a tinny roar of applause, and the final event rankings appeared on the screen. Yuuri sighed, closing the stream and shutting the laptop. "Yuri took gold again," he said, "but he won't be happy. He touched down on his last jump combination, and he wobbled a hair on the death drop spin. Judges didn't seem to notice much, but he did, and he's probably pissed about it."

"Naturally," Victor said, supremely uninterested in Yuri's tantrums at the moment. He sat down and pulled the diploma in front of himself, tapping at it. Yuuri rolled his eyes.

"Okay, look," he said. "I went to Detroit because that's where Ciao Ciao was, and I went to college because skating got me a small scholarship there and because I really needed something other than skating going on if I wasn't going to go completely crazy. The degrees…well, since I pretty much knew that if I was going to do something other than skate, it was going to be working at the onsen, I figured it didn't matter so much what I actually studied. I just took a bunch of classes that seemed interesting, and then an advisor sat down with me after a while and pointed out what I needed to do in order to turn it into a degree. Or degrees. I've never really decided whether this counts as one or two. Technically, probably just one, but with the extra work for the minor…" He hummed, more thoughtful than really concerned. "Anyway, it took an extra year, but everything eventually added up, and, ta-da—my very own official piece of paper."

Mindless of Victor's internal crisis, Yuuri pushed back from the table, heading to the cabinet for the canister of tea. "It was therapeutic, though," he continued. "The studies, the researching…it was really helpful for when I got too stuck in my own head, you know? Phichit got to the point where he could almost head off some of my skating-related panic attacks by catching me when I was just beginning to obsess over something and throwing one of my books or academic journals in front of me. I'd get sucked into that instead. Sort of weird, but it worked."

"But…" Victor couldn't find the words to say what he really meant, what felt so _wrong_ about this. " _Summa cum laude_! That's—okay, that's Latin, and I don't speak Latin, but it's essentially 'really good,' right?"

Yuuri chuckled. "Yes, Victor, it's essentially that. I mean, I did say the classes were interesting. I enjoyed them, and there was no real pressure except what I wanted to put on myself, so it just felt simple. Simpler than training, anyway."

Victor released a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a strangled squeak. As far as he was concerned, there was not a simple thing about this. Yuuri seemed to understand, huffing and smiling slightly.

"I guess it's mostly that I am proud, just not so much of the degree or the trappings. That's all just resume fodder, and it doesn't have any bearings on my career right now. What made me feel proud was what I did to _get_ the degree. I mean, I had a blast doing research. My professors really appreciated what I showed them, and they let me into all sorts of projects—a couple of case studies, an ethnography in my last year. Hey, you remember the 2011 Rostelecom Cup? You were at NHK then, I think. Anyway, I actually managed to get the college to fund a few extra days of lodging plus travel so I could meet with an advisor from one of our international partner schools, rent a car, and drive down with her to Kam'yanka, in the Ukraine, to do some interviews and field work with the ethnic Greeks there who speak Urum. It's a dying language; less than two hundred thousand people in the entire _world_ still speak it."

"Do you?" asked Victor numbly, feeling that he would no longer be even a bit surprised by it. If his Yuuri was actually a secret genius, anything was possible.

"Uh, no," Yuuri said, lifting an eyebrow. "But anyway, there was a local woman who translated, and I got all sorts of recordings and original source documents, and my advisor said I probably could have published the study when it was done."

Victor waited a minute, watching Yuuri stir his steeping tea. "Well? Why didn't you?" he finally asked.

"Well, Nationals was the month after that, and I had to focus on training."

This was unbearable. Bad enough when Yuuri ridiculously downplayed his ability and achievements on the ice, at which he genuinely had trouble believing, even now, that he was really as amazing as Victor and the rest of the world had told him he was. Now, in this brand new area of expertise Victor had uncovered, Yuuri knew damn well how good he was, but he was _still_ acting like it wasn't worthy of attention. Victor wanted to scream. He wanted to pull his own hair. He wanted to rent out a billboard and enlarge Yuuri's diploma so the letters were all ten feet tall, showing everyone in the country what sort of brilliant, incredible man he'd married.

"Even if I'd published the study, it would have been credited under my advisor's name as much as mine," Yuuri said, smirking wryly. "You know, just an undergrad. If I'd been a master's or doctoral student, they would have let me do more of the research and presentation on my own, maybe even do some work that could make a difference in the field of anthropological linguistics. Might have been nice, maybe, in another life."

And just like that, Victor can picture it. He and Yuuri, dressed to the nines in sophisticated suits—no, tuxedos. They're in a ballroom, some sort of honors reception, sitting at the head table, and Yuuri is being applauded and given some sort of prestigious award thing, for his work on preserving some ancient language or something. _"The Nobel Prize goes to Doctor Katsuki Yuuri!"_ The two of them had kept their own last names when they'd married in Barcelona, since neither Russia nor Japan had been all that keen on recognizing same-sex marriage anyway, but now he found himself madly in love with the sound of "Mr. Dr. Katsuki."

"You…could do that now, you know," Victor said, trying for a casual tone. "We're retired, and coaching doesn't take nearly as much time as competing."

Yuuri narrowed his eyes. Okay, perhaps that was an overstatement, or only strictly true for certain coaching styles, practiced by certain decorated Russian skaters, who had the benefit of an enabling spouse.

"Ah, I don't think so," Yuuri finally said as he swallowed the last of his drink. "It would cost an awful lot of money, and it _would_ take a lot of time and effort. I remember the looks on the grad students' faces, all starving and haunted. And it's such a niche area, you know? The payoff in the end would be…well, I'm not sure it would be worth it for us to invest in more education for me now." He stood up from the table, rinsed out his mug, and turned toward Victor with a different sort of smile. "But if you're feeling that impressed, I can think of some ways you could…show me how much?"

 _Oh, yes._ Victor was definitely on board for this. He hastily got up to follow Yuuri to their bedroom. In the back of his mind, though, he was still working out ideas. Yuuri was so smart, and it would be positively _wrong_ to let this go. For the sake of world betterment, of course. Victor had coached Yuuri into his full potential as a figure skater; he had no doubt in his mind that he could be his coach once more.

\---

**_Attempt #1_ **

Victor didn't actually think it would be all that difficult to tempt Yuuri back into pursuing his academic interests. Since they'd known each other, it had been pretty clear that one thing they had in common was the ability to maintain a single-minded focus (Chris called it "obsessive," but that was usually when he was trying to coax them into going clubbing when they had an early morning of practice scheduled) when working to master a new skill. All Victor needed to do was remind Yuuri a little; the way he'd talked about those projects showed just how much he'd enjoyed them.

What had Yuuri said Phichit had done? Something about pushing academic journals at him? That sounded easy enough. A journal was just like a magazine, right?

Victor was sitting on the couch, laptop on his stomach, so he didn't wake Yuuri—not that much was likely to do that at this hour of the morning, short of an explosion, but Victor was nothing if not considerate. He glanced at the diploma, which he'd wasted no time reverently placing into a frame that had formerly held some letter of commendation from the Russian athletic federation. Then he turned to his search bar.

 _journals linguistics_   
_journals anthropology_ _  
research journals languages_

Wow, those were expensive. Also, the titles of the publications sounded more than a little intimidating. "International Journal of Applied Linguistics"? He clicked through, but the blurb gave him no clue whether it was a good or bad source. So, perhaps not just like a magazine, after all. Giving up on the idea of thoughtfully selecting journals that Yuuri would love, Victor chose a handful of titles that sounded the most formidable, in his opinion, deciding that Yuuri's pleased smile would be well worth the frankly staggering subscription fees.

Then he turned his browser to a more familiar shopping site and spent the next hour happily browsing through tweed jackets with patches on the elbows.

When the first journals began arriving a few weeks later, Victor was impressed, simply on an aesthetic level, by the weight of them, literally and metaphorically. He felt more intellectual just holding one in his hand, and the coffee table was practically transformed by their presence. Victor couldn't help snapping a picture of it, though he resisted uploading it to his Instagram, hashtagged "#Katsubrain."

He waited, not precisely patiently, for Yuuri to notice the journals and say something, but he was disappointed by a lack of reaction. When he finally registered them there, Yuuri threw an exasperated but fond look at Victor, but beyond that it was…anticlimactic. Victor knew Yuuri was at least thumbing through them, since they shifted position and occasionally migrated into the bathroom, but there was no discussion. Certainly, there were no sudden declarations of renewed passions and intent to revive old career directions.

Victor would have to be more direct.

**_Attempt #2_ **

"Hello, Lukina? It's Victor! Wow, it's been a long time!"

Years before, Victor had attended a formal event with several of his sponsors, hosted by Saint Petersburg University. He didn't really remember much about the banquet, but one faint memory involved having a spirited discussion about sexism in sports with the head of the Physical Culture and Sports department. Lukina Mihaylovna was young for her position, but she'd recently come off a moderately successful stint with the women's national football team, and she'd had very definite opinions, which he'd happened to support wholeheartedly.  Yakov had been quite cross with him afterward, but Victor had no regrets about the entertaining turn the evening had taken, spurring each other on to louder and louder arguments about the stranglehold of the old-fashioned patriarchy on professional athletics.

But it had been a long time since he'd thought to reestablish contact, as distant as their personal circles were, and now he hoped the connection would still be useful.

"Victor! What a pleasure!" Her voice sounded friendly and cheerful, and the two of them chatted pleasantly, catching up, before Victor crossed his fingers and dived into his plan.

The problem, as he had begun to see it, was that perhaps part of what helped drive interest was the _esprit de corps_ (that phrase was part of the Figure Skating Federation's mission statement, incorporated into their logo, and he'd always liked the way it sounded) from being immersed in a culture with shared interests. The skating community had always been a hugely motivating force for both him and Yuuri, and he was sure that college had been a similarly fertile environment for growth. Yuuri needed to be surrounded with like minds again in order to rediscover his desire to pursue his studies.

Everything slotted into place as though it had been positively predestined, and he ended the phone call feeling giddy. It took a great deal of effort to conceal his eager grin when he sat at dinner with Yuuri that evening. "By the way," he said, breezily as he could, "I happened to hear from an old friend today, and I invited her and another friend of hers to dinner Friday night."

"Sounds fine," Yuuri agreed. "I had been thinking _gyudon_ anyway, and that'll be easy to double."

Victor beamed.

When Lukina showed up, he figured Yuuri would immediately catch on with the introductions. "And this is Lyudmila," she said as Yuuri shook hands with the older woman. "She's a friend and colleague at the university, head of the Faculty of Philology." Apparently, that was the school's equivalent to Yuuri's undergraduate program, and Victor anticipated a suspicious glance from his husband, but either Yuuri was being determinedly polite or else he was genuinely charmed by the women greeting him. Victor was elated, watching them hit it off so well.

Unfortunately, the reasons they continued to connect had little to do with linguistics, or academia at all. "Mr. Katsuki, my granddaughters are big fans of your skating," Lyudmila gushed. "The oldest, Martina, started taking lessons a few years ago, and her teacher says she's got some talent."

"Show him the video," Lukina urged, and then they were all huddled around a cell phone, cooing over a young girl wobbling through waltz jumps. Victor tried not to sigh out loud, retreating into the kitchen to grab another bottle of wine for them.

**_Attempt #3_ **

He was leaving too much to indirect chance, he decided. Simply setting the stage for Yuuri to find his own way back was apparently not going to be enough. Really, he should have predicted this; he'd needed to fly across the world to motivate Yuuri to keep skating, after all. (Yuuri said he hadn't really made the decision whether to retire or not back then, but Victor was glad he hadn't left that up to fate, either.)

He needed to be able to encourage Yuuri personally, and he had to be able to do it with more than vague statements of support. He was a little uncertain about it, based on his fruitless attempts to skim some of the journals accumulating around the apartment, but nobody would ever be able to call him a quitter. Well, not without good reasons, anyway. And retirement wasn't the same as quitting, really.

Knowing where primary loyalties lay and not wanting to tip his hand too soon, he decided to go first to Celestino, even though he knew Phichit would probably be the quicker solution. "It's for a scrapbook," he told the other coach, rationalizing away the lie by deciding that a scrapbook was actually not a bad idea. _A portrait of the scholar as a young man,_ he thought in amusement.

"Well, I can give you phone numbers for his old teachers, but I never really had much to do with any of that," Yuuri's former coach sighed. "Honestly, I couldn't really understand much of what he was talking about when he'd get going on his studies. I have some old campus newsletters from back then, and I think a couple of them mentioned him? I'll look, but your better bet for finding Yuuri's actual research is probably Phichit. That boy can pretty much find anything."

"Yes, I know," Victor said, remembering a very awkward evening listening to Yuuri and Phichit cackle over his own earliest press conferences. ("Victor, did you seriously just walk right out of the room because you wanted an ice cream?") "Thank you for trying."

Phichit sounded extremely skeptical about the scrapbook, but he seemed happy enough to show off Yuuri's successes. "I'd say I'm surprised he didn't keep the papers around, but I guess I'm not," he said, the sound of clicking keyboard strokes audible through the phone. "Sometimes it almost felt like he was thinking of all of this as pure entertainment—really enjoyable, but not all that consequential. Like, he's documenting stuff that might be completely _gone_ by the time our kids are in college, but, yeah, no big, right?"

"I know!" Victor said. "And I had no idea about any of it! Why did nobody ever explain this to me?"

"Well, I'll send you what I find, but after that, you're on your own, okay?" Phichit said. Victor agreed, not thinking much of the warning.

When the files arrived in his inbox, he understood.

"Makka, I can't even _read_ this!" he cried, burying his face in brown fur. "'If the absence of the phonologically null copy under coreference is predictive of incipient language attrition, the progressing situation in Kam'yanka can be characterized as…' What does any of that _mean?"_ Victor knew Yuuri's English was better than his own, but this wasn't even as simple as a vocabulary issue. He tried looking up the unfamiliar terms in online dictionaries, and he wound up even more confused than he had been before.

Makkachin nuzzled at his hands when he held them over his face. "Well, this was a waste of time," Victor mumbled unhappily. He dragged his palms downward over his eyes, then clicked through a few more pages. The charts and graphs were the worst, he decided, since those were the things that teased at the edges of his comprehension more than the rest. Victor hadn't gone to college, but of the subjects his secondary school tutors had taught him, math had always come easiest—a result of constantly having to calculate points and deductions quickly, sometimes mid-program. Still, these complicated grids displaying "regularization rates" and half-life of various words and "phonemes" (tantalizingly close to Cyrillic in appearance, but not quite) refused to make sense for him.

He sighed. Opened another paper. Sighed again, louder. _My Yuuri is an even bigger genius than I thought._ Victor mumbled his way through another abstract, feeling a strange mix of intimidated and turned-on. _He writes so well. I have no idea what any of this is saying, but it's practically poetry._ Victor could hear Yuuri's voice, seductive and rich, lilting about "lexical, morphological, and phonological developments," and it was _hot._

When Celestino forwarded him a scanned copy of a Wayne State newsletter that had an actual photograph of a younger Yuuri, flushed with visible pride and standing confidently in the middle of a group of sober-faced old men, it was just too much. Victor printed it "for the scrapbook," but a second copy somehow made its way into his wallet, cropped and folded lovingly, frequently taken out for admiration. This was starting to become a problem.

**_When All Else Fails_ **

Yurio (Victor felt no guilt over using the hated nickname when he was irritated) made it worse.

"Ha!" he cackled. "I always knew Katsudon was way too smart for you! I just didn't know it was that bad!"

"Why did I come to you about this?" Victor muttered. In hindsight, it was completely predictable that Yurio would find only cruel humor in his problem. "I don't need you to mock. I just need you to help me figure out what to do. To help Yuuri."

"You think you can help him?" the younger skater snickered. "You're a fucking moron in comparison to him! Hey, when you guys get your newspaper, does he have to help you figure out all the big words in the comic strips?"

Victor made him do edge pulls drills until the smirk dropped from his face.

Christophe wasn't really much more helpful.

"Mmmmm, I always thought I detected a bit of a 'sexy intellectual' vibe from him, especially in those glasses," Chris purred through the phone. "Smart men are so _sensual."_

Victor grimaced. He couldn't disagree, but he was feeling less like discussing the prospect than he might have earlier.

"I don't know what to tell you about getting him to enroll in school again," Chris said, "but have you considered tempting him with roleplaying as teacher and naughty student? 'Oh, Professor Katsuki, your course is so _hard!_ Tell me what I can do to _raise_ my grade—'"

Victor hung up.

"You probably can recite the base scores for all of Katsuki's free programs from when he was back in juniors, yet somehow you never bothered to ask him what he studied in college?" Yakov said dryly, not even a little sympathy in his voice. Victor didn't pretend it wasn't an accurate guess on his former coach's part. "Of course I knew about his academic success. Coaches talk about their skaters all the time, and it was noteworthy."

"You'd think so," Victor said quietly, still bewildered about how he could have missed knowing or asking.

"I'm surprised you didn't pick up on the change when the two of you moved here and you came back to skating," Yakov continued. "Hadn't you noticed that I no longer had to constantly call you to remind you about your obligations?"

Victor had noticed, though he'd chalked it up to developing a more mature relationship with his mentor, having become a coach himself.

"Hah," Yakov said, rolling his eyes. "It's because I started going through Katsuki for anything I expected you both to remember. Head for details, that one. His presence certainly made my job simpler. Now, what did you want advice about?"

"Never mind," Victor said.

An odd, entirely unfamiliar sensation was weighing heavily in Victor's gut, growing larger and more uncomfortable with each new realization. For possibly the first time in his life, he was beginning to feel inferior. Unworthy. It was an awful feeling. Even when his skating world records had been smashed by Yuuri and Yuri, he'd felt nothing but pride; after all, the breaking of a record doesn't negate the strength that the earlier record had shown, and he'd also been pleased to have played a role in those programs that broke them. Victor was competitive, but he didn't struggle with jealousy, either.

This, though, was different. He'd never considered himself a stupid man, despite the occasional slips of memory, but now when he tried to picture Yuuri in that tuxedo, accepting that award for general brilliance, he was having a much harder time imagining himself comfortably fitting into the crowd applauding him.

But it was too late. The boulder had finally started rolling down the hill, with no way to stop it.

"Yuuri? Have you seen my sweater?"

"Hmmmm?" Yuuri looked up from where he sat on the couch; an ink stain marred the tip of his nose. He was holding one of those damned journals in one hand, and with the other hand, he was scribbling something on a piece of scrap paper. "The tan one? I think it's on the hook in the bathroom."

"What are you writing?" Victor asked as he retrieved the sweater and pulled it over his head. The wool still held the scent of Yuuri's soap from when he'd borrowed it, and it made Victor smile.

"Mmmm, nothing much, really," Yuuri mumbled, pen scratching away. "Just some thoughts. Hey, you remember we have a meeting with one of Yuri's sponsors this afternoon, right?"

"Sure," Victor said. "Aren't we meeting her after lunch?"

"Well, yeah, but I'll have to join you there. Some of Lyudmila's grad students are having a working lunch today, and since a few of them are focusing on language evolution for their thesis work, they asked if I could join them, share some of my field experiences."

"Oh," said Victor. _Oh._

"It's okay, right?" Yuuri asked. "We didn't have any plans for lunch. I mean, if you want, I could text and ask if you could join us, but I think you'd probably be bored."

_He knows how stupid I am. He's too sweet to ever say anything about it, but he's always known. I'm apparently the only one who never saw it._

"That's all right," Victor said. "Have a good time." Later, when Yuuri breezed into the sponsor meeting breathless and sparkle-eyed, Victor nobly refrained from pouting.

More pieces of scrap paper, covered with scribbled notes, began appearing on the coffee table and the kitchen counter. The journals grew more dog-eared, and they showed up on Yuuri's bedside table, taunting.

"It was inevitable," Victor whispered to Makkachin as they snuggled on the bed. Yuuri was out in the living room watching a documentary about Australian indigenous people, and he'd even had the courtesy to look surprised when Victor had waved off invitations to watch with him. As though Victor's pathetic brain could handle anything beyond pulp movies, bad soap operas, and cartoons. "He was always too good for me, I guess." Makkachin stretched and groaned, giving counterpoint to his melancholy. "Hell, _you're_ probably too smart for me, too."

"Victor, have you completely lost your mind?" Yuuri leaned against the door frame, eyebrows high on his forehead and lips flattened.

"No?" Victor guessed. "Maybe?" Sighing and giving up, he added, "Would I miss it if I had?"

Yuuri tsked at him, crossing the room and flopping onto the bed next to him. "This has gotten ridiculous, you know. You've never been as subtle as you think. Everyone we know has been calling me lately, asking when I start classes and how my research is going. I was confused until I pieced together what you were trying to do, but now…well, now I'm just lost. "

"You _should_ go back to school," Victor said mournfully. "You'll be so happy. _I'll_ be happy for you."

"Yes, you look thrilled by the idea." Yuuri snorted, wrapping an arm around Victor's waist and snuggling up behind him. "You know, I'm not sure why you think I'd be happier working in academia than in skating. Did you think I wasn't satisfied?"

"No," Victor conceded. "But all that other stuff…"

"I find it interesting, yes. I don't know that I find it interesting enough to make me to jump into a graduate degree program that would be primarily taught in _Russian,_ Victor."

Victor hummed skeptically. "So smart, it probably wouldn't slow you down much."

"Thanks for that bizarre vote of confidence, but no. And I'm also not into the idea of moving us across the world to find a Japanese or English grad program, just so I could maybe start a second career, when I'm _perfectly happy_ in my first one." He kissed Victor firmly on the back of the neck to punctuate the sentence. "Maybe someday, when we're too old to care about skating, I'll change my mind. Not now, though. I'm enjoying reading about it, but I don't need or want more than that."

Victor exhaled, emotions swirling. "Are you sure you're not just saying that because you don't want me to feel bad?"

"I'm not even entirely sure why you got upset, anyway. I heard Yuri was his charming self about it—Mila overheard you guys—but you know better than to take him seriously when he's like that."

"I guess it all snowballed a bit," Victor confessed on a sigh. "A little hard not to be intimidated by someone as perfect as you, especially when it turns out you're even more perfect than I knew."

"Oh, Vitya." For a moment, Yuuri laughed quietly, though not meanly. "I told you, though. It's just a piece of paper. It says I worked hard, not that I'm special." Victor scoffed, and Yuuri squeezed him tighter. "You know, if you wanted to, _you_ could get your own diploma. The language wouldn't be a barrier for you, obviously. And I think I'd like helping you with your homework, maybe more than doing my own."

Victor almost scoffed again, almost laughed at the very idea. Before he did, though, Yakov's words suddenly floated through his brain again. _Katsuki's presence certainly made my job simpler._ Yuuri had done the same for him, too. Maybe it wasn't so farfetched.

He thought about it. He wasn't unhappy in _his_ career, either, but…well, there might be something to be said for getting a bit more training in the business aspects of things. And he always had enjoyed numbers.

"Do you think I could pull off a tweed jacket?" he mused, then fell apart in laughter as Yuuri growled playfully and launched a merciless attack on his ribs.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [Tumblr](http://carrieosity.tumblr.com) to shout at me about languages and academia, or skating husbands. Either one.


End file.
